Movie Poster of the Week – ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK

BadAzz MoFo’s celebration of the art of the movie poster (though not necessarily the movie itself).

Many of the movie posters that I’ll be highlighting here are for films of questionable quality (and some just plain suck). But then there’s those that, quite simply, totally kickass. Case in point: John Carpenter’s Escape from New York. As I’ve mentioned, Carpenter’s classic film helped spawn and entire genre of rip-off Italian exploitation films, some of which were really bad (like 1990: The Bronx Warriors), and the rest of which were terrible (like Escape from the Bronx). Here we have the Italian poster for Escape from New York, which is infinitely better than the American version (see below). Don’t get me wrong, I have an original version of the American poster hanging next to my computer. Excuse me for a second…I just had to marvel at its beauty. But compared to this Italian version, it’s just not all that awesome—more like kinda/sorta awesome. It’s made a bit more disappointing when you start to see some of the other posters for this movie, such as the quad poster just below the American version. Still, there’s no such thing as a bad Escape from New York poster, just some that kick ass more completely.

Here is another version, though I’ve never been that fond of this design.

And yet another…though I’m not sure if this version is a fan creation or not. The art itself is from the German version of the poster, but I’ve never actually seen an American version with this design.

And of course there’s this design — which is not an actual movie poster, but art that was created for the blu-ray release by Paul Shipper. Honestly, this might be my favorite of all the posters.

But then you have this fan poster by artist Chris Weston…and this is just amazing.